2016 Iowa Caucus Results – Open Thread

This page will be updated throughout the day with live results and news about the 2016 Iowa Caucuses which take place today. The actual caucusing doesn’t happen until this evening and hopefully we’ll have the results counted tonight unless the vote is very close. The race is very tight on the Democratic side with Bernie Sanders making strong gains on Hillary Clinton in recent weeks. On the Republican side, Donald Trump appears to lead on average by 6 to 8 points depending on the poll. However, the Iowa caucus is notorious for voters making last-minute decisions and the results often looking very different than the polling would suggest.

Latest updates throughout the day will appear here, newest at the top:

Update 5 – 8:40pm ET

Entrance polls have been conducted by various organizations, CBS News is reporting entrance interview numbers that look good for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton:

According to CBS News as of 8 p.m. ET, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the early leaders in the Iowa caucuses.

Based in part on interviews CBS News conducted, Trump is leading the Republican field at 29 percent. Sen. Ted Cruz is currently second at 22 percent, while Sen. Marco Rubio is third at 20 percent. Dr. Ben Carson is fourth at 9 percent and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is fifth at 4 percent.

On the Democratic side, Clinton is leading Sen. Bernie Sanders, 53 to 40 percent.

Keep in mind these are just informal entrance interviews asking caucus attendees who they plan to vote for, these are not official results. More to come soon…

Update 4 – 8:19pm ET

The caucuses are now underway. We’ll be hoping for results coming in by 10pm ET but it could be a late night depending on how the new 2016 caucus reporting app pans out. As soon as we start getting results, we’ll be posting the news and all the numbers.

Update 3 – 3:16pm ET

Iowa is bracing for possible record turnout tonight given that the snowstorm is not hitting the state until later in the night. The numbers vary, but anywhere in the neighborhood of 130,000 to 180,000 is possible given the intensity of caucus-goers in this cycle.

In 2012, about 121,000 caucused on the Republican side compared with about 119,000 in 2008. We could possibly see those numbers dwarfed tonight by new voters coming in for Donald Trump.

For comparison, in 2008, the Iowa Democratic caucuses saw 244,000 voters compared to just 125,000 in 2004. The surge in participation was directly due to then-Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy.

Update 2 – 12:27pm ET

The votes haven’t been cast in Iowa yet and already the post-Iowa narratives are taking shape. Regardless of what happens, it looks like the Bush and Rubio camps are set to battle for a spot in New Hampshire and a prize in South Carolina. See full story at CNN.

The first major test for the 2016 presidential candidates is now just hours away with the Iowa Caucus on Monday — its outcome a likely sign of whether front-running Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump can hold their leads or if the unpredictable and often-angry electorate has other plans.

Trump and Clinton made their closing arguments Sunday, barnstorming across Iowa and battling on the political shows, in a final effort to beat back close rivals like Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, both eager for an upset in the first-in-the-nation balloting.

“Thirty six hours from now, the men and women of Iowa are going to caucus,” Cruz, who is trailing Trump in Iowa by roughly 5 percentage points, told “Fox News Sunday.” “And we have a grassroots army. We’ve got 12,000 volunteers in the state.”

Still, Cruz, who argues that he’s the true conservative in the GOP field, was, like the rest of this year’s White House candidates, steering clear of predicting a win, then having to face the fallout from a loss or even a below-expectations finish.

“Right now, this is all about turnout,” said Cruz, a Texas senator in a close race for second with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “This is all about who shows up tomorrow night at 7. … If conservatives come out, we will win.”

Sanders, a Vermont independent, told ABC’s “This Week”: “I think we have a shot to win it, if people come out.”

His populist message about the economy being “rigged” against the middle class and “billionaires buying elections” has resonated with the largely disaffected and angry electorate and has posed a clear alternative to the Clinton political dynasty.

More updates today as news caucus news breaks. Stay tuned for the action this evening!

Nate Ashworth is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Election Central. He's been blogging elections and politics for almost a decade. He started covering the 2008 Presidential Election which turned into a full-time political blog in 2012 and 2016.

75 COMMENTS

Praying for a Ted Cruz victory, demonstrating that those good people of Iowa are not interested in having a boisterous bloviating blowhard as the President of this once, and possibly still, proud nation. This year may be the last chance for a redemption of the U.S.A. – please make it happen! God bless.

sorry Cruz is an idiot….not a fan of Trump but he’s the best republican aside from the lady who is the former hp ceo. And Bernie is the only candidate worth voting for on the Dem side. But Cruz is a snake oil salesman.

Hopefully, the good people of Iowa have learned from their mistakes of the past. Ted is certainly a solid candidate, who posesses all of the tools to be a great leader for our country. God’s Will be done, regardless.

I, too, think New Hampshire will be more challenging, but South Carolina is far more important for Ted. If he can win there, I believe he will ultimately secure the nomination. Of course, as we have already seen, there are many things happening in both parties that are far from logical.

Not just that… they’re promoting him for more than just that reason. They’re actually remarkably good at doing this.

First off, they always come up with a strategy, and that strategy involves going up against a particular candidate… usually the one they see as having the most exploitable vulnerabilities. So, they chose McCain for us, then they chose Romney for us, and then they chose Trump for us. That’s the LEFT choosing, just to be clear.

They also have another thing that they look at… they want to find a candidate who is, among all the options, the least objectionable to them if somehow that candidate DID win. So, they got Romney (who had previously supported government-run singlepayer health care… aka “Romneycare”) and before that, they’d gotten John McCain (who votes with Democrats at least as often as he votes with Repubicans, and who holds many positions common with Democrats).

So… they picked Trump a the most easy to beat in the general election… AND as the one who shares more of their positions than any other (R) candidate (not surprising, since he’s a life-long Democrat and a close personal friend of Bill Clinton, and even funded Rahm Emmanuel’s mayoral race).

They don’t want him to win… they’ve got a HUGE magazine of ammo to use against him… but if somehow he DID win, they could “work with him.”

So then go Rhinos!?! Are there any real Republicans out there to vote for? At the very least the game is now a foot & the endless prattle & saber rattling can lead to a culling of the field… The big question is what new alliances will now form & who will now become the king makers… Nixon started all this Fox News Channel sound boarding, but where has the fournier Rupert Murdoch taken the Grand Old Party’s TV outlet? Is the Hillary of my Donald my Hillary? How much real space is between these two centrists Trump & Clinton? I long for the days of a real power struggle between the left & the right where you could see the difference between the two parties… Well happy caucusing Iowa you are the beginning of a very interesting race to the White House. God help us all if it goes to hell in a handbasket this year.

Ideas, ideals, solutions, leadership on moral & social justice grounds; those are the things to debate about… but the media promoters want everyone to be focused on tiered old echo chamber subjects like: Hillary’s emails, Bengasie, Obama’s paper trail, Cruz’s Citizenship, McCain’s war record, Iran’s fake nuclear program, Iraq’s Serian-Turkish ISIS/ISIL problem, meeting Putin in the green room… all these things are selatiuse & news worthy but are about as relevant as Rush Limbaugh’s time traveling horse to the real elephants in the room: China’s encroachment into the South China Sea & Batcrap crazy in North Korea setting off a so called Hydrogen bomb… all conveniently not mentioned in the faux 2016 debates on both sides of the isle! Who is running the show America? Get out the vote or just get out before it’s too late.

Cruz & Rubio are two of the most dangerous men in the world because they don’t want to cross there superpac puppet masters, the Koch brothers, the John Birtch Society never has had it this good; not even in the days of Ronald Reagan’s support of Barry Goldwater.

You have a good point there progressive speller… you made me laugh this morning till I saw the news about North Korea launching a satellite, was it a nuclear satellite, we may never know because it is not being covered by the American News Media at this time.

Hillary hasn’t won yet — but, she still shrieked like a demented banshee many hours before this partial accounting of votes, as her “victory acceptance” speech — watch the gyrating ugliness of the Clinton Clan:

Most of the human population can and does say what they mean especially when they are younger. The reason they dont do it as much when they get older is because they learned over the years that they (the average human) are not very smart so they are more careful of what they say. I have a 150ish IQ and several science degrees and know more history than most and even I choose my words very carefully.

Its not about courage, most have too much of it, its about intelligence of which Trump has none. Courage does not run a household, business, or country. Intelligence does. This is not like Rocky fighting Apollo.

If you can honestly sit and say Trump has no intelligence, your obviously fooling yourself.

The man is a billionaire. He is a talented businessman whom has built and empire and wishes to do so for America. Why is that so bad?

OH! I know.. The whole “he filed for bankruptcy protection” line your about to throw my way.

Ugh, NO! He like so many others have used it as a tool to restructure certain parts of his business as to make them successful again.

You continually like many others bash Trump yet he is really the clear choice. He has the age and history that this country needs. This country cannot take anymore new studs trying to be somebodies like 1st term Cruz or even young such as Rubio. We just can’t.

We need a seasoned veteran that knows how to do business and knows what works and what doesn’t. Now more than ever do we need this.

Come Janurary 2017, this country will have a Republican at the helm come hell or high water i am sure. I know people are so fed up with the Democrap party that if one got reelected that more than likely this country would have a civil war on it’s hands.

No vote count for the Democrats in Iowa, why? Oh yeah, it is too embarrassing to publish. 1398 votes were cast for Sanders and Clinton combined. Rick Santorum received 1683 votes which was 1% of the vote total for the Republicans which resulted in him dropping out of the race. Worst showing for Democrats but Republicans are turning out in record numbers which does not bode well Democrats in local races this fall.